IELTS Real Reading Test 2026 - Q1 Test 4 with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
Luyện tập đề IELTS Real Reading Test 2026 - Q1 Test 4 được lấy từ cuốn sách Real Test 2026 - Q1 với trải nghiệm thi IELTS trên máy và giải thích đáp án chi tiết bằng Linearthinking, kèm answer key và list từ vựng IELTS cần học trong bài đọc.
IELTS Real Reading Test 2026 - Q1 Test 4 with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 1
Question 1 - 7
Complete the notes below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Researchers believed the tea containers detected in
1.
from the Han Dynasty was the first evidence of the use of tea.
Lu Yu wrote a
2.
about tea before anyone else in the eighth century.
It was
3.
from Japan who brought tea to their native country from China.
Tea was carried from China to Europe actually by the
4.
.
The British government had to cut down the taxation on tea due to the serious crime of
5.
.
Tea was planted in
6.
besides China in the 19th century.
In order to compete in shipping speed, traders used
7.
for the race.
Question 8 - 13
Do the following statements agree with the information given in the Reading Passage?
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
8
Tea was popular in Britain in the 16th century.
9
Tea was more fashionable than coffee in Europe in the late 16th century.
10
Tea was enjoyed by all classes in Britain in the seventeenth century.
11
The adulteration of tea also prompted William Pitt the Younger to reduce the tax.
12
Initial problems occurred when tea was planted outside China by the East India Company.
13
The fastest vessels were owned by America during the 19th century clipper races.
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 2
Question 14 - 18
Reading Passage has six paragraphs A-F
Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter, A-F
14
A reference to a domestic situation that does not require multitasking.
15
A possible explanation of why we always do multitask.
16
A practical solution to multitask in work environment.
17
Relating multitasking to the size of prefrontal cortex.
18
Longer time spent doing two tasks at the same time than one at a time.
Question 19 - 23
Look at the following statements and the list of scientists below.
Match each statement with the correct scientist, A-E.
Write the correct letter, A-E.
NB You may use any letter more than once.
List of Findings
A
Thomas Lehman
B
Earl Miller
C
David Meyer
D
Gloria Mark
E
Edward Hallowell
19
When faced multiple visual stimulants, one can only concentrate on one of them.
20
Doing two things together may be faster but not better.
21
People never really do two things together even if you think you do.
22
The causes of poor efficiency at work lie in the environment.
23
Even minor changes in the workplace will improve work efficiency.
Question 24 - 26
Complete the notes below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
A term used to refer to a situation when you are reading a text and cannot focus on your surroundings is
24.
.
The
25.
part of the brain controls multitasking.
The practical solution of multitask in work is not to allow the use of cellphone in
26.
.
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 3
Question 27 - 30
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes on your answer sheet.
27
In the first paragraph, the writer points out that
A
fear and stress are different feelings
B
most humans develop strategies for dealing with fear
C
business situations cause more fear than others
D
some people never experience fear
28
When discussing the use of rhesus monkeys as experimental subjects, the writer notes that
A
they react more quickly to fear than humans
B
they are more influenced by fear than humans
C
their mental growth resembles that of humans
D
their brains work more slowly than those of humans
29
Which of the following did Kalin and Shelton outline as the second stage in their research project?
A
the identification of expressions of anxiety in monkeys
B
the identification of situations that arouse stress in monkeys
C
an analysis of brain development in monkeys
D
the study of reactions to fear in monkeys of different ages
30
In the fourth paragraph, the writer notes that the three related situations
A
reflect common experiences for infant humans and monkeys
B
highlight the similarities between monkey and human infant care
C
were predicted to cause monkeys more distress than human infants
D
were graded in terms of their potential effect on young monkeys
Question 31 - 35
Look at the following responses of monkeys and the list of conditions below.
Match each response with the correct condition, A, В or C.
NB You may use any letter more than once.
List of Findings
A
the alone condition
B
the no-eye-contact condition
C
the stare condition
31
aggressive facial expressions
32
prolonged stillness
33
а combination of contradictory signals
34
appeals for maternal protection
35
the production of soft sounds
Question 36 - 40
Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer.
Once they had identified three types of defensive behaviour, Kalin and Shelton grouped the monkeys according to their , in order to discover precisely when they were able to respond appropriately to different fear-related cues. They videotaped their results and found that monkeys as young as reacted to the cues but in a haphazard fashion. The researchers noted that they seemed to be unaware of the who were around them. Despite demonstrating , the monkeys in the middle groups failed to react in ways corresponding to the experimental situation. The oldest group, however, reacted in the same way as and the researchers concluded that monkeys are capable of selective responding between nine and 12 weeks old.
DOL IELTS Đình Lực
05/05/2026
📖 Bài đọc passage 1
The history of tea
The story of tea begins in China. According to legend, in 2737 BC, the Chinese emperor Shen Nung was sitting beneath a tree while his servant boiled drinking water, when some leaves from the tree blew into the water. Shen Nung, a renowned herbalist, decided to try the infusion that his servant had accidentally created. The tree was a Camellia sinensis, and the resulting drink was what we now call tea. It is impossible to know whether there is any truth in this story. But tea drinking certainly became established in China many centuries before it had even been heard of in the West. Containers for tea have been found in tombs dating from the Han Dynasty (206 BC-220 AD) but it was under the Tang Dynasty (618-906 AD), that tea became firmly established as the national drink of China.
It became such a favourite that during the late eighth century a writer called Lu Yu wrote the first book entirely about tea, the Ch’a Ching, or Tea Classic. It was shortly after this that tea was first introduced to Japan, by Japanese Buddhist monks who had travelled to China to study. Tea received almost instant imperial sponsorship and spread rapidly from the royal court and monasteries to the other sections of Japanese society.
So at this stage in the history of tea, Europe was rather lagging behind. In the latter half of the sixteenth century there are the first brief mentions of tea as a drink among Europeans. These are mostly from Portuguese who were living in the East as traders and missionaries. But although some of these individuals may have brought back samples of tea to their native country, it was not the Portuguese who were the first to ship back tea as a commercial import. This was done by the Dutch, who in the last years of the sixteenth century began to encroach on Portuguese trading routes in the East. By the turn of the century they had established a trading post on the island of Java, and it was via Java that in 1606 the first consignment of tea was shipped from China to Holland. Tea soon became a fashionable drink among the Dutch, and from there spread to other countries in continental western Europe, but because of its high price it remained a drink for the wealthy.
Britain, always a little suspicious of continental trends, had yet to become the nation of tea drinkers that it is today. Starting in 1600, the British East India Company had a monopoly on importing goods from outside Europe, and it is likely that sailors on these ships brought tea home as gifts. The first coffee house had been established in London in 1652, and tea was still somewhat unfamiliar to most readers, so it is fair to assume that the drink was still something of a curiosity. Gradually, it became a popular drink in coffee houses, which were as much locations for the transaction of business as they were for relaxation or pleasure. They were though the preserve of middle-and-upper-class men; women drank tea in their own homes, and as yet tea was still too expensive to be widespread among the working classes. In part, its high price was due to a punitive system of taxation.
One unforeseen consequence of the taxation of tea was the growth of methods to avoid taxation — smuggling and adulteration. By the eighteenth century many Britons wanted to drink tea but could not afford the high prices, and their enthusiasm for the drink was matched by the enthusiasm of criminal gangs to smuggle it in. What began as a small time illegal trade, selling a few pounds of tea to personal contacts, developed by die late eighteenth century into an astonishing organised crime network, perhaps importing as much as 7 million lbs annually, compared to a legal import of 5 million lbs! Worse for die drinkers was that taxation also encouraged the adulteration of tea, particularly of smuggled tea which was not quality controlled through customs and excise. Leaves from other plants, or leaves which had already been brewed and then dried, were added to tea leaves. By 1784, the government realised that enough was enough, and that heavy taxation was creating more problems than it was worth. The new Prime Minister, William Pitt the Younger, slashed the tax from 119 per cent to 12.5 per cent. Suddenly legal tea was affordable, and smuggling stopped virtually overnight.
Another great impetus to tea drinking resulted from the end of the East India Company’s monopoly on trade with China, in 1834. Before that date, China was the country of origin of the vast majority of the tea imported to Britain, but the end of its monopoly stimulated the East India Company to consider growing tea outside China. India had always been the centre of the Company’s operations, which led to the increased cultivation of tea in India, beginning in Assam. There were a few false starts, including the destruction by cattle of one of the earliest tea nurseries, but by 1888 British tea imports from India were for the first time greater than those from China.
The end of the East India Company’s monopoly on trade with China also had another result, which was more dramatic though less important in the long term: it ushered in the era of the tea clippers. While the Company had had the monopoly on trade, there was no rush to bring the tea from China to Britain, but after 1834 the tea trade became a virtual free for all. Individual merchants and sea captains with their own ships raced to bring home the tea and make the most money, using fast new clippers which had sleek lines, tall masts and huge sails. In particular, there was competition between British and American merchants, leading to the famous clipper races of the 1860s. But these races soon came to an end with the opening of the Suez Canal, which made the trade routes to China viable for steamships for the first time.
🔥 Đáp án & giải thích 1
1
tombs
Giải thích chi tiết
☺️ Ứng dụng Linearthinking để giải quyết dạng bài Gap Fill
Step 01: Read the question to understand (main idea + detail) + Predict Word Form + Meaning
Simplified: the tea containersdetected in________ was the first evidence of the use of tea
Main idea: Các nhà nghiên cứu tin rằng những bình trà được tìm thấy trong ________ từ thời nhà Hán là bằng chứng đầu tiên về việc sử dụng trà.
Prediction: Danh từ (Noun) – địa điểm / nơi chứa vật thể → nơi tìm thấy bình trà)
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Step 02: Locate relevant information
🔍 Từ khoá: “tea containers”, “Han Dynasty”, "the first evidence", "the use of tea".
→ Dựa vào các từ khoá trên → Tìm được trích dẫn ở đoạn 1
-------
Step 03: Read relevant information to understand (main + detail)
📌Trích dẫn: “Containers for tea have been found in tombs dating from the Han Dynasty (206 BC–220 AD)” (Đoạn 1)
Simplified: Containers for teahave been found in tombs from the Han Dynasty
Main idea: Các bình đựng trà đã được tìm thấy trong các ngôi mộ có niên đại từ thời nhà Hán → chứng tỏ người Trung Quốc đã dùng trà từ rất sớm.
-------
Step 04: Compare meaning with meaning
Trong bài đọc: Bình đựng trà → được tìm thấy trong các ngôi mộ từ thời nhà Hán
Trong câu hỏi: Các nhà nghiên cứu tin rằng các hộp đựng trà được phát hiện trong ________ từ thời nhà Hán
→ Từ cần điền là "các ngôi mộ"
Do you read while listening to music? Do you like to watch TV while finishing your homework? People who have these kinds of habits are called multi-taskers.
A
A. Multitasks are able to complete two tasks at the same time by dividing their focus. However, Thomas Lehman, a researcher in Psychology, believes people never really do multiple things simultaneously. Maybe a person is reading while listening to music, but in reality, the brain can only focus on one task. Reading the words in a book will cause you to ignore some of the words of the music. When people think they are accomplishing two different tasks efficiently, what they are really doing is dividing their focus. While listening to music, people become less able to focus on their surroundings. For example, we all have experience of times when we talk with friends and they are not responding properly. Maybe they are listening to someone else talk, or maybe they are reading a text on their smart phone and don’t hear what you are saying. Lehman called this phenomenon ‘email voice’.
B
The world has been changed by computers and its spin offs like smart-phones or cellphones. Now that most individuals have a personal device, like a smartphone or a laptop, they are frequently reading, watching or listening to virtual information. This raises the occurrence of multitasking in our day to day life. Now when you work, you work with your typewriter, your cellphone, and some colleagues who may drop by at any time to speak with you. In professional meetings, when one normally focuses and listens to one another, people are more likely to have a cell phone in their lap, reading or communicating silently with more people than ever, liven inventions such as the cordless phone has increased multitasking. In the old days, a traditional wall phone would ring, and then the housewife would have to stop her activities to answer it. When it rang, the housewife will sit down with her legs up and chat, with no laundry or sweeping or answering the door. In the modern era, our technology is convenient enough to not interrupt our daily tasks.
C
Earl Miller, an expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, studied the prefrontal cortex, which controls the brain while a person is multitasking. According to his studies, the size of this cortex varies between species. He found that for humans, the size of this part constitutes one third of the brain, while it is only 4 to 5 percent in dogs, and about 15% in monkeys. Given that this cortex is larger on a human, it allows a human to be more flexible and accurate in his or her multitasking. However, Miller wanted to look further into whether the cortex was truly processing information about two different tasks simultaneously. He designed an experiment where he presents visual stimulants to his subjects in a wax that mimics multi-tasking. Miller then attached sensors to the patients’ heads to pick up the electric patterns of the brain. This sensor would show if the brain particles, called neurons, were truly processing two different tasks. What he found is that the brain neurons only lit up in singular areas one at a time, and never simultaneously.
D
Davis Meyer, a professor of University of Michigan, studied the young adults in a similar experiment. He instructed them to simultaneously do math problems and classify simple words into different categories. For this experiment. Meyer found that when you think you are doing several jobs at the same time, you are actually switching between jobs. Even though the people tried to do the tasks at the same time, and both tasks were eventually accomplished, overall, the task took more time than if the person focused on a single task one at a time.
E
People sacrifice efficiency when multitasking, Gloria Mark set office workers as his subjects. He found that they were constantly multitasking. He observed that nearly every 11 minutes, people at work were disrupted. He found that doing different jobs at the same time may actually save time. However, despite the fact that they are faster, it does not mean they are more efficient. And we are equally likely to self-interrupt as be interrupted by outside sources. He found that in office nearly every 12 minutes an employee would stop and with no reason at all, cheek a website on their computer, call someone or write an email. If they concentrated for more than 20 minutes, they would feel distressed. He suggested that the average person may suffer from a short concentration span. This short attention span might be natural, but others suggest that new technology may be the problem. With cellphones and computers at our sides at all times, people will never run out of distractions. The format of media, such as advertisements, music, news articles and TV shows are also shortening, so people are used to paying attention to information for a very short time.
F
So even though focusing on one single task is the most efficient way for our brains to work, it is not practical to use this method in real life. According to human nature, people feel more comfortable and efficient in environments with a variety of tasks, Edward Hallowell said that people are losing a lot of efficiency in the workplace due to multitasking, outside distractions and self-distractions. As a matter of fact, the changes made to the workplace do not have to be dramatic.
No one is suggesting we ban e-mail or make employees focus on only one task. However, certain common workplace tasks, such as group meetings, would be more efficient if we banned cell-phones, a common distraction. A person can also apply these tips to prevent self-distraction. Instead of arriving to your office and checking all of your e-mails for new tasks, a common workplace ritual, a person could dedicate an hour to a single task first thing in the morning. Self-timing is a great way to reduce distraction and efficiently finish tasks one by one, instead of slowing ourselves down with multi-tasking.
🔥 Đáp án & giải thích 2
14
B
Giải thích chi tiết
☺️ Ứng dụng Linearthinking để giải quyết dạng bài Matching Information
📌 Dạng Matching Information chúng ta nên làm cuối cùng, sau khi đã làm các dạng câu hỏi khác nhé DOLBIES, bởi vì lúc này mình đã đọc và hiểu nội dung của bài rồi, cộng thêm nghệ thuật Specify của Linearthinking → sẽ nhanh chóng tìm được vị trí đáp án hơn!!
-------
Step 01: Read the question to predict
Hiểu câu hỏi: A domestic situation that does not require multitasking
Specify & Predict: Tìm đoạn văn nhắc đến công việc nhà hoặc bối cảnh gia đình mà ở đó người ta chỉ tập trung làm một việc duy nhất thay vì làm nhiều việc cùng lúc, ví dụ: ngồi nghe điện thoại mà không làm việc nhà, chỉ tập trung trò chuyện...
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Step 02: Khoanh vùng đoạn văn
🔍 Từ khóa: “reference", "domestic situation", "multitasking"
→ Dựa vào các từ khoá trên, có thể khoanh vùng được đoạn B vì có xuất hiện các cụm như:
Researchers are investigating the processes in the brain that give rise to fear in animals. The results may lead to new ways to treat human anxiety.
Over the years, the majority of people acquire a range of skills for coping with frightening situations. They will attempt to placate a vexed teacher or boss and will shout and run when chased by a hostile stranger. But some individuals become overwhelmed in circumstances others would consider only minimally stressful: fear of ridicule might cause them to shake uncontrollably when called on to speak in a group, or terror of strangers might lead them to hide at home, unable to work or shop for groceries. Why do certain people fall prey to excessive fear?
Ned H. Kalin and Steven E. Shelton at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are addressing this problem by identifying specific brain processes that regulate fear and its associated behaviors. Despite the availability of non-invasive computer imaging techniques, such information is still extremely difficult to obtain in humans. Hence, they have turned their attention to another primate, the rhesus monkey. These animals undergo many of the same physiological and psychological developmental stages that humans do, but in a more compressed time span. As we gain more insight into the nature and operation of neural circuits that modulate fear in monkeys, it should be possible to pinpoint the brain processes that cause inordinate anxiety in people, and to devise new therapies to counteract it. Effective interventions would be particularly valuable if they were applied at an early age, as growing evidence suggests overly fearful youngsters are at high risk of later emotional distress.
When they began their studies two decades ago, Kalin and Shelton knew that they would first have to find cues that elicit fear and identify behaviors that reflect different types of anxiety. With such information in hand, they could then proceed to determine the age at which monkeys begin to match defensive behaviors selectively to specific cues. Finally, by determining the parts of the brain that reach maturity during the same time span, they could gain clues to the regions that underlie the regulation of fear and fear-related behavior.
The experiments were carried out at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Kalin and Shelton discerned varied behaviors by exposing monkeys between six and 12 months old to three related situations. In the alone condition, an animal was separated from its mother and left by itself in a cage for ten minutes. In the no-eye-contact condition, a person stood motionless outside the cage and avoided looking at the solitary infant. In the stare condition, a person was again present and motionless but, assuming a neutral expression, peered directly at the animal. These positions are no more frightening than those that primates encounter frequently in the wild, or those that human infants encounter every time they are left at a day-care center.
In the alone condition, most monkeys became very active and emitted frequent gentle ‘coo’ calls made with pursed lips. More than 40 years ago it was deduced that when an infant monkey is separated from its mother, it yearns to regain the closeness and security provided by nearness to the parent. These responses help to draw the mother’s attention. In contrast, in the more frightening no-eye-contact situation, the monkeys reduced their activity greatly and sometimes froze for extended periods of time. When an infant spots a potential predator, its goal shifts from attracting the mother to becoming inconspicuous. Inhibiting motion and freezing are common attempts to achieve this in many species. If the infant perceives that it has been detected, its aim shifts to warding off an attack. So the stare condition evoked a third set of responses. The monkeys made several hostile gestures: barking (forcing air from the abdomen through the vocal cords to emit a harsh, growl-like sound) and staring back. Sometimes the animals mixed the threatening displays with submissive ones, such as fear grimaces, which look something like wary grins, or grinding of teeth.
Having identified three categories of defensive behaviors, Kalin and Shelton set about determining when infant monkeys first begin to apply them effectively. Several lines of work had led them to surmise that the ability to make such choices emerges when an infant is around two months old. To establish the critical period of development, they examined four groups of infant monkeys ranging in age up to 12 weeks old. The babies were separated from their mothers, left to acclimatize to a cage, and then exposed to the alone, no-eye-contact and stare conditions. All sessions were videotaped for analysis. They found that the infants in the youngest group (no more than two weeks old) engaged in defensive behaviors. But they lacked some motor control and seemed to act randomly, as if they had not noticed the human beings that were present. Babies in the two intermediate-age groups had good motor control, but their actions seemed unrelated to the test condition. Only animals in the oldest group (nine- to 12-week olds) conducted themselves differently in each situation, and their reactions were both appropriate and identical to those of mature monkeys. This finding meant motor control was not the prime determinant of selective responding and that nine to 12 weeks is the critical age for the appearance of a monkey's ability to adaptively modulate its defensive activity to meet changing demands.
🔥 Đáp án & giải thích 3
27
B
Giải thích chi tiết
☺️ Ứng dụng Linearthinking để giải quyết dạng bài Multiple Choice
Step 01: Read the question to understand (main idea + detail)
Simplified: the writer points out in the first paragraph that …
Main idea: Tác giả nêu ra ý chính gì ở đoạn đầu tiên.
-------
Step 02: Locate relevant information
→ Đọc đoạn 1 và xác định ý chính về nỗi sợ.
-------
Step 03: Read relevant information to understand (main + detail)
📌 Trích dẫn: “Over the years, the majority of people acquire a range of skills for coping with frightening situations. They will attempt to placate a vexed teacher or boss and will shout and run when chased by a hostile stranger. But some individuals become overwhelmed in circumstances others would consider only minimally stressful: fear of ridicule might cause them to shake uncontrollably when called on to speak in a group, or terror of strangers might lead them to hide at home, unable to work or shop for groceries.”
Dựa vào phần Simplify & Connection trên, ta rút ra được:
-> Main idea: Đa số con người dần phát triển các kỹ năng để đối phó với những tình huống gây sợ hãi.
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Step 04: Compare meaning with meaning
❌ A. fear and stress are different feelings: đoạn không so sánh fear và stress.
✅ B. most humans develop strategies for dealing with fear: khớp trực tiếp với ý “the majority of people acquire a range of skills for coping with frightening situations.”
❌ C. business situations cause more fear than others: không nói môi trường kinh doanh gây sợ hãi hơn.
❌ D. some people never experience fear: đoạn không hề nói có người không bao giờ sợ hãi.
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➡️ Đáp án: B. most humans develop strategies for dealing with fear
The story of tea begins in China. According to legend, in 2737 BC, the Chinese emperor Shen Nung was sitting beneath a tree while his servant boiled drinking water, when some leaves from the tree blew into the water. Shen Nung, a renowned herbalist, decided to try the infusion that his servant had accidentally created. The tree was a Camellia sinensis, and the resulting drink was what we now call tea. It is impossible to know whether there is any truth in this story. But tea drinking certainly became established in China many centuries before it had even been heard of in the West. Containers for tea have been found in tombs dating from the Han Dynasty (206 BC-220 AD) but it was under the Tang Dynasty (618-906 AD), that tea became firmly established as the national drink of China.
It became such a favourite that during the late eighth century a writer called Lu Yu wrote the first book entirely about tea, the Ch’a Ching, or Tea Classic. It was shortly after this that tea was first introduced to Japan, by Japanese Buddhist monks who had travelled to China to study. Tea received almost instant imperial sponsorship and spread rapidly from the royal court and monasteries to the other sections of Japanese society.
So at this stage in the history of tea, Europe was rather lagging behind. In the latter half of the sixteenth century there are the first brief mentions of tea as a drink among Europeans. These are mostly from Portuguese who were living in the East as traders and missionaries. But although some of these individuals may have brought back samples of tea to their native country, it was not the Portuguese who were the first to ship back tea as a commercial import. This was done by the Dutch, who in the last years of the sixteenth century began to encroach on Portuguese trading routes in the East. By the turn of the century they had established a trading post on the island of Java, and it was via Java that in 1606 the first consignment of tea was shipped from China to Holland. Tea soon became a fashionable drink among the Dutch, and from there spread to other countries in continental western Europe, but because of its high price it remained a drink for the wealthy.
Britain, always a little suspicious of continental trends, had yet to become the nation of tea drinkers that it is today. Starting in 1600, the British East India Company had a monopoly on importing goods from outside Europe, and it is likely that sailors on these ships brought tea home as gifts. The first coffee house had been established in London in 1652, and tea was still somewhat unfamiliar to most readers, so it is fair to assume that the drink was still something of a curiosity. Gradually, it became a popular drink in coffee houses, which were as much locations for the transaction of business as they were for relaxation or pleasure. They were though the preserve of middle-and-upper-class men; women drank tea in their own homes, and as yet tea was still too expensive to be widespread among the working classes. In part, its high price was due to a punitive system of taxation.
One unforeseen consequence of the taxation of tea was the growth of methods to avoid taxation — smuggling and adulteration. By the eighteenth century many Britons wanted to drink tea but could not afford the high prices, and their enthusiasm for the drink was matched by the enthusiasm of criminal gangs to smuggle it in. What began as a small time illegal trade, selling a few pounds of tea to personal contacts, developed by die late eighteenth century into an astonishing organised crime network, perhaps importing as much as 7 million lbs annually, compared to a legal import of 5 million lbs! Worse for die drinkers was that taxation also encouraged the adulteration of tea, particularly of smuggled tea which was not quality controlled through customs and excise. Leaves from other plants, or leaves which had already been brewed and then dried, were added to tea leaves. By 1784, the government realised that enough was enough, and that heavy taxation was creating more problems than it was worth. The new Prime Minister, William Pitt the Younger, slashed the tax from 119 per cent to 12.5 per cent. Suddenly legal tea was affordable, and smuggling stopped virtually overnight.
Another great impetus to tea drinking resulted from the end of the East India Company’s monopoly on trade with China, in 1834. Before that date, China was the country of origin of the vast majority of the tea imported to Britain, but the end of its monopoly stimulated the East India Company to consider growing tea outside China. India had always been the centre of the Company’s operations, which led to the increased cultivation of tea in India, beginning in Assam. There were a few false starts, including the destruction by cattle of one of the earliest tea nurseries, but by 1888 British tea imports from India were for the first time greater than those from China.
The end of the East India Company’s monopoly on trade with China also had another result, which was more dramatic though less important in the long term: it ushered in the era of the tea clippers. While the Company had had the monopoly on trade, there was no rush to bring the tea from China to Britain, but after 1834 the tea trade became a virtual free for all. Individual merchants and sea captains with their own ships raced to bring home the tea and make the most money, using fast new clippers which had sleek lines, tall masts and huge sails. In particular, there was competition between British and American merchants, leading to the famous clipper races of the 1860s. But these races soon came to an end with the opening of the Suez Canal, which made the trade routes to China viable for steamships for the first time.
Simplified: Containers for teahave been found in tombs from the Han Dynasty
Main idea: Các bình đựng trà đã được tìm thấy trong các ngôi mộ có niên đại từ thời nhà Hán → chứng tỏ người Trung Quốc đã dùng trà từ rất sớm.
B. The world has been changed by computers and its spin offs like smart-phones or cellphones. Now that most individuals have a personal device, like a smartphone or a laptop, they are frequently reading, watching or listening to virtual information. This raises the occurrence of multitasking in our day to day life. Now when you work, you work with your typewriter, your cellphone, and some colleagues who may drop by at any time to speak with you. In professional meetings, when one normally focuses and listens to one another, people are more likely to have a cell phone in their lap, reading or communicating silently with more people than ever, liven inventions such as the cordless phone has increased multitasking. In the old days, a traditional wall phone would ring, and then the housewife would have to stop her activities to answer it. When it rang, the housewife will sit down with her legs up and chat, with no laundry or sweeping or answering the door. In the modern era, our technology is convenient enough to not interrupt our daily tasks.
C. Earl Miller, an expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, studied the prefrontal cortex, which controls the brain while a person is multitasking. According to his studies, the size of this cortex varies between species. He found that for humans, the size of this part constitutes one third of the brain, while it is only 4 to 5 percent in dogs, and about 15% in monkeys. Given that this cortex is larger on a human, it allows a human to be more flexible and accurate in his or her multitasking. However, Miller wanted to look further into whether the cortex was truly processing information about two different tasks simultaneously. He designed an experiment where he presents visual stimulants to his subjects in a wax that mimics multi-tasking. Miller then attached sensors to the patients’ heads to pick up the electric patterns of the brain. This sensor would show if the brain particles, called neurons, were truly processing two different tasks. What he found is that the brain neurons only lit up in singular areas one at a time, and never simultaneously.
D. Davis Meyer, a professor of University of Michigan, studied the young adults in a similar experiment. He instructed them to simultaneously do math problems and classify simple words into different categories. For this experiment. Meyer found that when you think you are doing several jobs at the same time, you are actually switching between jobs. Even though the people tried to do the tasks at the same time, and both tasks were eventually accomplished, overall, the task took more time than if the person focused on a single task one at a time.
E. People sacrifice efficiency when multitasking, Gloria Mark set office workers as his subjects. He found that they were constantly multitasking. He observed that nearly every 11 minutes, people at work were disrupted. He found that doing different jobs at the same time may actually save time. However, despite the fact that they are faster, it does not mean they are more efficient. And we are equally likely to self-interrupt as be interrupted by outside sources. He found that in office nearly every 12 minutes an employee would stop and with no reason at all, cheek a website on their computer, call someone or write an email. If they concentrated for more than 20 minutes, they would feel distressed. He suggested that the average person may suffer from a short concentration span. This short attention span might be natural, but others suggest that new technology may be the problem. With cellphones and computers at our sides at all times, people will never run out of distractions. The format of media, such as advertisements, music, news articles and TV shows are also shortening, so people are used to paying attention to information for a very short time.
F. So even though focusing on one single task is the most efficient way for our brains to work, it is not practical to use this method in real life. According to human nature, people feel more comfortable and efficient in environments with a variety of tasks, Edward Hallowell said that people are losing a lot of efficiency in the workplace due to multitasking, outside distractions and self-distractions. As a matter of fact, the changes made to the workplace do not have to be dramatic.
No one is suggesting we ban e-mail or make employees focus on only one task. However, certain common workplace tasks, such as group meetings, would be more efficient if we banned cell-phones, a common distraction. A person can also apply these tips to prevent self-distraction. Instead of arriving to your office and checking all of your e-mails for new tasks, a common workplace ritual, a person could dedicate an hour to a single task first thing in the morning. Self-timing is a great way to reduce distraction and efficiently finish tasks one by one, instead of slowing ourselves down with multi-tasking.
Over the years, the majority of people acquire a range of skills for coping with frightening situations. They will attempt to placate a vexed teacher or boss and will shout and run when chased by a hostile stranger. But some individuals become overwhelmed in circumstances others would consider only minimally stressful: fear of ridicule might cause them to shake uncontrollably when called on to speak in a group, or terror of strangers might lead them to hide at home, unable to work or shop for groceries. Why do certain people fall prey to excessive fear?
Ned H. Kalin and Steven E. Shelton at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are addressing this problem by identifying specific brain processes that regulate fear and its associated behaviors. Despite the availability of non-invasive computer imaging techniques, such information is still extremely difficult to obtain in humans. Hence, they have turned their attention to another primate, the rhesus monkey. These animals undergo many of the same physiological and psychological developmental stages that humans do, but in a more compressed time span. As we gain more insight into the nature and operation of neural circuits that modulate fear in monkeys, it should be possible to pinpoint the brain processes that cause inordinate anxiety in people, and to devise new therapies to counteract it. Effective interventions would be particularly valuable if they were applied at an early age, as growing evidence suggests overly fearful youngsters are at high risk of later emotional distress.
When they began their studies two decades ago, Kalin and Shelton knew that they would first have to find cues that elicit fear and identify behaviors that reflect different types of anxiety. With such information in hand, they could then proceed to determine the age at which monkeys begin to match defensive behaviors selectively to specific cues. Finally, by determining the parts of the brain that reach maturity during the same time span, they could gain clues to the regions that underlie the regulation of fear and fear-related behavior.
The experiments were carried out at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Kalin and Shelton discerned varied behaviors by exposing monkeys between six and 12 months old to three related situations. In the alone condition, an animal was separated from its mother and left by itself in a cage for ten minutes. In the no-eye-contact condition, a person stood motionless outside the cage and avoided looking at the solitary infant. In the stare condition, a person was again present and motionless but, assuming a neutral expression, peered directly at the animal. These positions are no more frightening than those that primates encounter frequently in the wild, or those that human infants encounter every time they are left at a day-care center.
In the alone condition, most monkeys became very active and emitted frequent gentle ‘coo’ calls made with pursed lips. More than 40 years ago it was deduced that when an infant monkey is separated from its mother, it yearns to regain the closeness and security provided by nearness to the parent. These responses help to draw the mother’s attention. In contrast, in the more frightening no-eye-contact situation, the monkeys reduced their activity greatly and sometimes froze for extended periods of time. When an infant spots a potential predator, its goal shifts from attracting the mother to becoming inconspicuous. Inhibiting motion and freezing are common attempts to achieve this in many species. If the infant perceives that it has been detected, its aim shifts to warding off an attack. So the stare condition evoked a third set of responses. The monkeys made several hostile gestures: barking (forcing air from the abdomen through the vocal cords to emit a harsh, growl-like sound) and staring back. Sometimes the animals mixed the threatening displays with submissive ones, such as fear grimaces, which look something like wary grins, or grinding of teeth.
Having identified three categories of defensive behaviors, Kalin and Shelton set about determining when infant monkeys first begin to apply them effectively. Several lines of work had led them to surmise that the ability to make such choices emerges when an infant is around two months old. To establish the critical period of development, they examined four groups of infant monkeys ranging in age up to 12 weeks old. The babies were separated from their mothers, left to acclimatize to a cage, and then exposed to the alone, no-eye-contact and stare conditions. All sessions were videotaped for analysis. They found that the infants in the youngest group (no more than two weeks old) engaged in defensive behaviors. But they lacked some motor control and seemed to act randomly, as if they had not noticed the human beings that were present. Babies in the two intermediate-age groups had good motor control, but their actions seemed unrelated to the test condition. Only animals in the oldest group (nine- to 12-week olds) conducted themselves differently in each situation, and their reactions were both appropriate and identical to those of mature monkeys. This finding meant motor control was not the prime determinant of selective responding and that nine to 12 weeks is the critical age for the appearance of a monkey's ability to adaptively modulate its defensive activity to meet changing demands.
